The Best VPN for Watching British TV

IN days gone by, most of the major UK television stations were fairly easy to watch online. Certainly the bBC did some basic region locking but they didn’t try very hard and you could even use free proxies scraped from the internet to access the site as long as they were based in the UK.

Unfortunately that’s all changed and now the BBC is among the most aggressive in blocking access to it’s site to international viewers. All proxies are now blocked automatically, you won’t find any proxy that now works with the BBC site or iPlayer. VPNs have suffered a similar fate although there is no complete ban as there is no effective way to detect whether a VPN is being used.

What the BBC has done is started targeting the biggest VPN services who advertise region lock bypassing. They also monitor the connections and ban IP addresses manually if there are too many simultaneous users. So although there are still some VPN services that work there are much fewer than previously.

As you can see if you try and access the BBC from outside the UK, you’ll get redirected to the international version. Also if you attempt to access the BBC iPlayer site directly you’ll simply get a polite message saying that this content is unavailable.

However if you use a decent VPN service which has servers in the UK then it will work perfectly. The BBC site sees the IP address of the VPN server instead of your real one and will allow access to the complete site. You’ll also be able to stream live TV although obviously you’ll have to account for the time difference depending on where you are.